The present invention relates to a dye-containing silver halide photographic material. More particularly, the present invention relates to a silver halide photographic material that contains a hydrophilic colloidal layer tinted with an effective light-absorbing dye and which has reduced color remnant while exhibiting good aging stability.
With a view to absorbing light in a specific wavelength region it is common practice with silver halide photographic materials to tint photographic emulsion layers or other layers. If it is necessary to control the spectral composition of light to be incident on a photographic emulsion layer, a tinted layer is disposed on the side more remote from the base support than said photographic emulsion layer. This tinted layer is generally referred to as a filter layer. If more than one photographic emulsion layer is present as in a multilayer color photographic material, the filter layer may be located intermediate between adjacent emulsion layers.
When light scattered during or after passage through a photographic emulsion layer is reflected at the interface between the emulsion layer and the support or from the surface on the side of the light-sensitive material opposite to the emulsion layer, it re-enters the same photographic emulsion layer to cause a blurred image or an image with halo. In order to prevent this phenomenon, a tinted layer is provided between the photographic emulsion layer of interest and the support or on the side of the support opposite to that emulsion layer. This tinted layer is referred to as an anti-halation layer. An anti-halation layer may be disposed between adjacent layers in a multilayer color light-sensitive material.
Photographic emulsion layers are sometimes tinted for the purpose of preventing decrease in image sharpness due to light scattering in the emulsion layers (a phenomenon generally referred to as "irradiation").
The layers to be tinted are in most cases formed of a hydrophilic colloid, so water-soluble dyes are usually incorporated in those layers to tint them and such dyes must satisfy the following conditions:
(1) they should have an appropriate spectral absorption that suits the specific purpose of use;
(2) they should be photochemically inert (i.e., they should not cause chemically adverse effects, such as sensitivity drop or fogging, on the performance of a silver halide photographic emulsion layer of interest); and
(3) they should be decolored or dissolved away during photographic processing to leave no deleterious tinting behind on the processed photographic material.
Heretofore, with a view to discovering dyes which satisfy the above-mentioned conditions, many efforts have been made and, in consequence, a variety of dyes have been proposed. These dyes include, for example, the oxonol dye described in British Patent 506,385, U.S. Pat. No. 3,247,127, etc., the styryl dye described in U.S. Pat. No. 1,845,404, the merocyanine dye described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,493,747, the cyanine dye described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,843,486, and the like. However, dyes which satisfy all of the above said conditions and which are therefore useable in photographic materials are very few, this having been the actual state prior to the creation of the present invention.
Photographic materials can be exposed and processed for image formation by a "scanner method". Image formation by a scanner method involves scanning of the original, exposing on a silver halide photographic material based on the resulting image signal, and forming a negative or positive image corresponding to the image on the original. A semiconductor laser is used as the most preferred light source for recording by this method since it has the following advantages: it is small in size, is inexpensive, allows for easy modulation, and is long-lived compared to He-Ne lasers and argon lasers. In addition, semiconductor lasers provide greater convenience in handling since they emit light in the infrared region and hence permit the use of a bright safelight if photographic materials that are sensitive to infrared light are employed.
An example of infrared absorbing dyes that satisfy these requirements is described in Japanese Patent Application (OPI) No. 62-123454 (the term "OPI" as used herein means an "unexamined published Japanese patent application") and it is a tricarbocyanine dye having at least three acid groups in the molecule. It has recently been found, however, that when this dye is applied to a silver halide photographic material, the aging stability of the material is not necessarily improved to a satisfactory extent and reduction in sensitivity or deterioration in color remnant sometimes takes place.